


caught between madness and gladness of flight

by TheJGatsby



Series: potentially lovely perpetually human [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, Force Ghosts, Gen, Post-Canon, angst angst angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 22:22:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5887546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheJGatsby/pseuds/TheJGatsby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wonders who really broke him- her or himself.<br/>(Or, Kylo Ren starts taking himself back)</p>
            </blockquote>





	caught between madness and gladness of flight

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as something VERY different than what it ended up being but I'm still relatively satisfied with the end result  
> minor tw for suicide mention  
> Title from I Want to Sing by Regina Spektor (and probably the most transparent title ever lmao)

Bacta might knit his skin back together, sculpt livid scars from gaping wounds, but its healing effects can’t do anything to touch the screaming turmoil of his mind after Starkiller.

From the moment _she_ came barrelling into his universe, everything was knocked off course, every atom of his world completely, incredibly, irrevocably changed. Up was down and he was _addicted_ to the light that surrounded her like angel’s fire, the sweet brightness that enraptured his soul ever since she pushed her way into his mind and left her scorching, radiant mark on everything he was. He’d been knocked off-kilter, and he’d revolted against the feeling and he’d attacked her and fought her, but even as part of him screamed for her destruction, the rest of him just yearned to be close to her, to bathe in her light, let it wash over him. He’d been in the darkness too long and it was like water in the desert, he was _desperate_ for every drop of it he could get.

She destroyed him, laid waste to him, took him and decimated him and left him shattered. Nothing remains, in her wake, of the weak hate and anger he clung to so stubbornly, only emptiness- _potential_ , he hears from somewhere in the depths of his memory, _all destruction holds in it the potential for something new, Ben_ \- and for the first time he doesn’t _want_ to fill it with more dark loathing, impotent fury. He’s tired of it, tired of trying and failing, tired of running from the guilt that chases him in every quiet moment, tired of clinging to the dark even as the light pulls at him, so much stronger than he could ever hope to be.

In the end, as he lays in the stark, sterile medbay, his newly-healed wounds itching under bandages, the question he refuses to ask himself is whether she was solely responsible for leaving him a smoking ruin, or whether all the rage and venom he’d fed so eagerly for years has just finally burned through him, perished silently after consuming everything he had.

He wonders who really broke him- her or himself.

He knows he can’t bring himself to resurrect the hate he felt towards his father. He knows all there is left is bitter regret, anguish, yearning. He thinks of his family, and for the first time since he was ten years old and they left him with Skywalker to train, he misses them, wants to see his mother again, wants to go _home_.

He wants the light he can still feel when he closes his eyes.

\---

The first… vision? Hallucination? Dream? Whatever they are, the first one happens while he’s still on Starkiller. One minute he was lying in the snow, feeling the world collapse around him, waiting for his inevitable death by blood loss or planet explosion, ready and eager for the end. Then he’s sitting on top of a sandstone hut, staring out at a binary sunset over a vast, endless desert. He blinks and he’s in a small, spartan bedroom, nothing in it but a cot and a desk with a datapad laid out neatly on it. When he glances around, he sees a young man next to him, maybe nineteen, his hair cut in the style of padawans of the old Jedi order, the thin braid hanging down over his shoulder. He looks sidelong at Ren and smiles, and seems to shift before Ren’s eyes, a flash of a bright-eyed, scruffy little boy, and then for a split second a towering menace with a familiar black mask, and then he seems to settle into a twenty-something-year-old form, a scar over his eye, robes of the old Jedi order in stark black and red. The scenery’s changed, as well, to a vine-wrapped stone balcony overlooking a serene, crystal lake, hazy blue mountains in the distance. The air is sweet and rich with life, and Ren feels, despite himself, an overwhelming sense of peace. If this is the afterlife, he doesn’t mind being dead.

“You’re really something,” the man says, fond and amused and more than a little sad, “you know that, Ben?”

Ren bristles. “Do _not_ call me-”

The man waves his hand dismissively, cutting him off. “I know, I know- that name is nothing to you now, you’re not that person, et-cetera. I remember.” He shakes his head. “Give it time, you’ll miss it, too.”

“Never,” Ren snarls, glaring out at the picturesque landscape in front of him. The beauty makes him sick, now, it’s too much and too pretty and too… he hates it.

The man hums thoughtfully. “Tell me,” he says, “if you could go back and undo it, all of it, knowing what you do now, would you?”

Ren twists his hands, grinds his teeth, swallows back the _yes_ that leaps to his tongue. Age has provided the perspective he lacked when he was fifteen and he decided that the didn’t want to swallow the ‘accept things as they are, change what you can, let go of what you can’t’ doctrine his family sold him, chose the instant gratification of the dark side over playing the long game of letting things get better gradually, watching the galaxy slip and crack again and again as it fought to right itself on its own. It was all the passionate idealism that kept his mother fighting the good fight and none of the steadfast patience that let her do it in the Senate. But his remorse is his business.

“Of course not,” Ren scoffs, as if reading from a script. “I’m restoring order to the galaxy, carrying on my grandfather’s legac-”

“Don’t you _dare_ blame me for your mistakes,” the man hisses, his hands tightening into fists at his side with a mechanical whir and the creak of leather, and for a moment between breaths he’s someone else, and then he’s back, his serene, sad smile replaced by a haunted look, something angry and frightened behind his eyes.

“You’re Darth Vader,” Ren says in hushed wonder, and the man stares solemnly at the horizon. He’s silent for a few moments, and Ren is at a loss for words.

“I’m Anakin Skywalker,” he says, finally. “I was born Anakin Skywalker, and I died Anakin Skywalker, and I was a lot of things in between, but it always came back to Anakin Skywalker.”

Ren gaped at him for a long moment. He’d known what his uncle said, but there’d been a part of him that had… doubted, always. It didn’t make sense to him, as a young, lonely boy with an evil whisper in his ear, how anyone could just throw away everything Darth Vader had had, his iron grip on the galaxy, the quiet, terrified awe with which people said his name, even now, thirty years later. Most of his doubt rested in the fact that Luke always insisted that he’d given it up because he loved his son- Ren, with Han Solo as a father, had hardly believed fatherly love was worth more than spit, much less the whole _galaxy_ . He never understood. “You had so much _power_ ,” Ren says, frowning down at his own hands. “Why would you ever have given that up?”

“I never wanted power,” Anakin says dismissively, smiling and shaking his head. “I wanted to protect the people I loved.”

Ren jerks back in surprise. Every story he’d ever heard of the fall of Anakin Skywalker, even Luke’s, had been relatively common on the point that, even if it was love that brought him back, Anakin had turned for want of power, for the seductive promises of the dark side of a strength beyond that allowed by the repressive, restrictive Jedi order. Ren couldn’t help the sudden spike of envy, that Anakin could have loved and been loved so deeply that it would be worth changing the fate of the _galaxy_ over. He wondered, absently, what it felt like.

“Here’s the thing about the dark side,” Anakin says. “It never gives you anything back. You feed it and you feed it, give it all you have- you sell your loyalty, your values, your _self_ … you give and you give and it takes and it takes and what do you have left?” He sighs. “I was born a slave, did you know that about me? Until the Jedi bought my freedom and took me to train, all I had for myself was my name, and in the end I even gave that up for the dark side. And I got nothing back, not a thing- I fought and killed and destroyed everything I’d ever held dear, for… empty promises, in the end. By the time I realized I was, essentially, a slave again, I figured it was too late for me to turn back.”

“But Luke said-”

“Killing the emperor didn’t undo everything I’d done before it. There really is no turning back, but what I did- what _you_ can still do- is start to take back. You can’t fix the past, but you can take back what you gave and you can move forward.”

The idea of it is… ridiculous. Even if he decided to do it- he’d sold himself so young, been parceling parts of his soul off to the dark side since he was a child. Could he even take it back? Did he even know all he’d lost? Who was he without the darkness?

“What if I’m not strong enough?” Ren asks, looking at Anakin out of the corner of his eye.

“The thing about going back,” Anakin says with a wry smile, “is that you rarely have to do it alone. You’d be surprised how many people are willing to help you if you’re willing to let them.”

“I don’t think Uncle Luke has the same faith in me he did in you, Grandfather,” Ren says, quiet and hollow, remembering the look of dismayed, enraged betrayal in his uncle’s eyes as he watched the new Jedi order fall.

“I wasn’t talking about Luke,” Anakin says, leaning over to catch his grandson’s eye. “But it starts with you, okay? You have to want it. No one can help you if you don’t want it.”

“And what if I don’t?” Ren asks, an empty challenge. He does, he knows he does, _stars_ how he wants anything, _anything_ that isn’t more of the same, any break from the agonizing downward spiral of his life. He just… he thought that succumbing to the darkness would be the change he needed. He’s beginning to come to grips with how wrong he was.

Anakin doesn’t say anything for a while, then, finally, “When was the last time you spoke to your mother, Ben?”

Ren blinks. “I can’t remember.”

“I never did,” Anakin says, voice heavy with regret. “I never met my daughter, not as… not as her father. And now I never will. I gave up everything I’d ever cared about, brought the galaxy crumbling down, all to save my family, and after all that, I never met my daughter.”

Ren- Ben? Kylo- looks at his grandfather, really looks at him for the first time, and he doesn’t see the powerful Sith who held the galaxy in his fist for decades, the indomitable warrior who made a legend of himself in the Clone wars, doesn’t see the idol he’d spent half his life aspiring towards and hero-worshipping. In that moment, leaning on the railing of a stone balcony, staring out over whatever wide, glittering lake conjured before them from a memory, Anakin is nothing more than a man, as mortal and fallible as any other, weary with the weight of the sins he carries, a lifetime of pain in a million forms etched into his steady blue eyes. He’s not the greatest Sith to ever live, he’s not great at all. He’s just… human. Just a man trying, desperately, to keep his misguided grandson from making the same mistakes that destroyed him, trying to save someone he fears may be beyond his reach.

He looks at his grandfather’s pensive face, the guilt etched into every troubled line, and he thinks of his father and the fact that he died trying to save him, and he thinks of his mother and the fact that he may have gone too far for even a mother’s love to reach, and he thinks about all he’s done and all Anakin did and the comparative weight of the unforgivable, and he’s filled with a self-loathing so deep and consuming and passionate that he thinks if he could keep it burning he’d be able to be really, truly dark- and all he had to do was stop running from his conscience.

Anakin’s watching him again as he glares out at the water, his nails biting into his palms, practically gasping from the crush of emotion in his chest. “How am I supposed to live with myself, now? If I even survive?” he asks tightly, his gut twisting with fear and heartache.

“I haven’t the faintest clue,” Anakin replies with a rueful smile. “Living with yourself is, well, a problem for the living. But sometimes you just have to... accept that some things are never going to be okay. And breathe. Life goes on regardless of how we feel about it.” He squeezes Ren’s shoulder and, in the dream, it almost feels real. “Don’t give up, okay? May the Force be with you.”

“May the Force be with you, Grandfather.”

And then it’s all gone.

\---

His dreams after that were feverish, wild snippets of surreality that come and go as quick and intransient as the tides. Flashes of the inside of a bacta tank, med-droids and stark, sterile white walls and Hux’s voice, tight with barely-contained hatred. And then he’s lying in the medbay on Hosnian Prime where he went when he was seven and he fell and broke his arm and got a concussion, and his father is sitting at the end of his bed, watching him with a steely, serious gaze. Han’s younger, closer to how he looked when Ben left to train with Luke, his hair is thick and dark with only the slightest hint of gray beginning to show around the temples. It makes something in Kylo’s chest ache, intensely, to look at his father a mere twenty years previously, see how much he aged, know that the deep lines on his face and shock of white on his head were probably his son's fault. Kylo is awkwardly large in the room, his adult body in a place he only knew as a child, but the one thing he hasn’t outgrown is the squirming guilt in his gut at the look on his father’s face- disappointment, expectation, an undercurrent of anger. The “you’re in trouble and you’d better own up to it” look he got so often as a kid.

The silence sits and stretches, heavy on Kylo’s shoulders, turning the air to molasses. He curls his fists in the blankets at his side, gritting his teeth against the tears he can feel pricking at the back of his eyes, and he feels young and vulnerable under his father’s gaze. “Dad,” he says at last, voice shaking, “I messed up.”

“Did you ever,” Han says, in a low, sad tone Kylo’s never heard before. It hits him like a punch to the gut, and then Kylo’s crying, like a _child_ , like he hasn’t since before everything started going wrong, since he stood and watched his parents fly away and leave him behind, alone, abandoned, unloved- but, no, never, not really, not the way he’d thought, and he _sees_ that now, he _understands_ because he’s not ten anymore, not lost and scared and so _young_ , with a dark voice whispering in his ear, the wolf leading him off the path, and no one to bring him back. But he knows, now, that they tried, they did their best, and it wasn’t their fault, that they wouldn’t have sent him if they’d known any other way to help him, and he’s known it, in the back of his mind, for years, that tiny crack of doubt in his heart, and it grew and grew as the years and the tragedies piled on, and now he’s sitting here, split wide open from it and so, so _sorry_.

He can hardly bear to look at his father, because the sorrow is like a hundred knives in his chest, but at the same time he can’t stand to look away, miss out on a single second of the face he thought he’d never see again. “How do I fix it?” he asks, between rough, shuddering breaths.

“You can’t,” Han replies, hard and thin-lipped and caught somewhere between grief and fury. “You were right- my son is dead.”

He turns away.

“Dad,” Kylo says, voice cracking. “I’m sorry. Please, I’m so, so sorry, please- Dad, just _help me_ , I’m sorry! I want to fix it, _please_ !” He’s sobbing, nearly hysterical, and Han doesn’t turn back. Kylo buries his face in his hands, digging his nails into his skin. He wants to rip it off, expose the raw, throbbing agony underneath, claw his way to the growing stone of sick remorse and anguish in his chest and crush it in his fist, tear himself open and destroy all that he is, all that he’s ever been. When he looks out through the slits between his fingers the scene has changed and he’s standing on the Finalizer, watching the red streaks of Starkiller’s lasers arc languidly across the sky. He slams his hands down on the console in front of him and screams, wild immeasurable rage, years of holding his tongue and schooling his expression and shoving everything away finally catching up to him. “I didn’t _want_ this!” he howls, pounding his fist on the transparisteel viewport. “I never wanted any of this!”

“Then what _did_ you want?” asks a familiar voice, behind him, and he whirls to face the scavenger.

“I- I wanted....,” he trails off, staring helplessly at her.

“Power?” she asks, stalking closer, challenging him. He shrinks. “Immortality? Strength? Figure it out, _Kylo Ren_ .” He feels pathetic in front of her, as if she’s somehow looming over him despite the head of height he has on her. “Because you’re the one who’s going to have to figure out whether it was worth murdering your own _father_ over.”

“It wasn’t!” he shouts, reaching for his lightsaber, coming up empty-handed. The scavenger levitates it tauntingly, then with a sharp twist of her hand she crumples it into scrap and tosses it over her shoulder.

“No weapons,” she says. “Just the truth.” She looks up at him, her gaze strong and unflinching, and that’s what breaks him. He falls to his knees in front of her, his fists on the ground, shaking violently.

“The next time we meet,” he says, voice rough, eyes trained on her boots, “you have to kill me. You have to. It has to happen and I- I don’t have the courage to do it myself.”

She crouches down and reaches for his face, tilting it up gently to meet her eyes. “Suicide isn’t courageous.”

“It is when you’re a _monster_ ,” he spits, pulling away from her. “Just promise you’ll kill me, scavenger. Promise.” She doesn’t respond, and he grabs desperately at her tunic, practically tearing the ragged cloth. “Promise me,” he begs, hoarse and frenzied. “Promise me!”

“Death would be too easy,” she says, “you need to live. That’s the real punishment.” She shoves him away from her and he falls backwards.

When his head hits the console, he wakes with a choked scream to the medbay on the Finalizer.

It takes another week for them to release him from the medbay, and after that it takes a full day to reach Snoke’s temple. He spends it sitting in front of his grandfather’s helmet, his visions and nightmares running through his head over and over and over like a broken holovid. If his resolve to struggle towards the dark side had been weak when he’d left Starkiller, it’s almost nonexistent by the time he gets word that they’ve jumped out of hyperspace and are approaching Snoke’s planet.

He doesn’t have a plan, not yet. He’s still trying to figure it out. He’s _going_ to figure it out. He’s not giving another inch to the First Order. He’s not sure how, yet, but it’s time to start picking up the pieces.

It’s time to start making things _right_.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [tumblr](http://thejgatsbykid.tumblr.com)!


End file.
